With the help of the great guys at Slicehost.com, I am attempting to run my benchmark series on a virtual private server, to compare with EC2. However, I’m seeing a very strange result for the baselines: a PHP page delivers more requests-per-second than a static HTML page.

According to his results, his runs of ab (the Apache benchmarking tool) showed that requests against the index.html file (versus the index.php) came in at almost 400 requests per second slower. As it turns out, though, the problem of the skewed results wasn't in the serving up of the requests but in the ab tool itself. He picked up another testing tool, seige, and ran that with the same requests and got more correct results.

After looking around for different hosting for some of his projects (one that was a bit more PHP-developer friendly), Brandon Savage looked into Slicehost, a virtual server option that gives a bit more control than the larger, more typical shared hosting environments. Here's his review of the move.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but what I got was pretty amazing. Slicehost works by offering virtual servers for each account - that is, for each account they offer, you get your own box. [...] You're responsible for putting anything on it you want. And that's where the fun starts: you really can put anything you want on it.

The slices allow you to customize your PHP builds, add in MySQL, change up Apache - whatever you want. All you need to know is how to compile things and get them working together. Slicehost isn't a good option for someone that's not familiar with linux system administration, but if you know exactly what you want and how to put it there, their pricing is one of the best out there (plus they just got bought up by Rackspace so their future seems bright).